I used to date this girl and we liked listening to 90's R & B cuz it was quirky and we were into being quirky long before Zooey and all her doe-eyed straight-banged acolytes had even listened to a Smiths record. There's supposed to be more of a story there, but it's just digressing into bitter commentary...so hold on to that little adolescent anecdote for me.
Anyway, Brothertiger is the clever alias of John Jagos, a dude from the midwest. Like me...sort of, except he's actually from the midwest and I'm from a place that tries its damndest to be called "the midwest" and not "the south." I do like to dance though. He went to Ohio University and started recording some tunes, delightfully nuanced dance music with all the shimmer and euphoria of radio-friendly dance jams from the Slick Willy whitehouse administration, as an extracurricular pursuit and it caught on. Snooty people probably wanna call this stuff "Chillwave" or something retarded, but I just call it a good time. Lo-fi cassette style dance music that's supposed to evoke the "carefree and woozy feelings of summer." Backed.
Seriously peep this "Lovers" video. It's got lots of cool stuff in it, like waify models in black leotards lip-syncing and shaking their money-makers on the same set that Weezer used for their self-titled album cover (hyuk hyuk...also, insert The Feelies Crazy Rhythms). I also dig the gold shoes, and the fact that this reminds me of staying up late and watching things on MTV2 that made me dumber.
This comes from the album Golden Years available on Mush Records. Video directed by Kiki Allgeier.
For: Modest Mouse sped up x1,000, Ariel Pink, Spook Houses sped up x1,000
Byline: GAHZA lives, dies, records album, can't stand the sound of its own voice. Destroys.
It is difficult to know what to make of GAHZA. In many ways the concept is simple. Take Sad Sappy Sucker-era Isaac Brock songs that were recorded on answering machines and tape recorders of recorded over lecture notes and shopping lists, and push the fast-forward button. The result is probably exactly how you think that would sound. Gahza is all the fun you had as a kid recording yourself and then playing it back with the tape sped up. Laughing at your chipmunk sounding voice and all the embarrassing long pauses and “ums” that you still hate in your voice.
It can’t be that simple, can it? Songs banged out with a guitar, drums, a voice and then sped up to warp for novelty? I would be partially disappointed if this was a musically conceptual-driven album. Something like slowcore sped up x1,000 or analog digital hardcore. Part of me wants to believe in the innocence of GAHZA: the record, push fast-forward, giggle, immediately set up bandcamp page version of GAHZA I have in my mind.
This is weird. This is "Ariel Pink would-do-it-if-he-thought-of-it-but-he-didn’t-so-now-a-band-called-GAHZA-is-doing-it" type stuff. Musically, GAHZA doesn’t stray out of deft acoustic guitar riffage, cardboard pit-a-pat drums, sped up to an overcranked ragtime, White Jazz jitter. On the weirder weird stuff GAHZA drones, plays the washed out drum machine and translucent guitar of Rangers and Not Not Fun luminaries.
One startling exception comes in the midpoint longplayer “GAHZA LOVES” which plays like an instrumental outtake from any fine and respected 90s lo-fi rippers like Secret Stars or early Sebadoh. This, along with closing track “GAHZA’S LAST STAND” whose bent-note guitar licks invite further Modest Mouse comparisons, are some of the few songs that can be listened to and enjoyed outside of the context of the album and run over a minute. Speaking of context, the album seems to revolve around the birth, life, loss, drug addiction, death and resurrected of the eponymous character GAHZA. World Village points for that.
Depending on your ability to stomach things like this, GAHZA is not a bad listen, nor is it challenging once you get over the novelty. Well-placed reprieves from the chipmunk voice and fast-forward instrumentation are welcome. In fact, my earlier observations aren’t completely accurate. The fast-forward normal sounding music only makes up a small—yet noticeable—portion of their songs. Most of the instruments are mixed separately, so while the guitars are doing their weird quadruple-time thing the percussion is actually keeping normal time suggesting that their approach to making music isn’t as casual as originally thought. Huh, pretty brilliant.
For: Napalm Death (duh), Rotten Sound, Tragedy, Cursed
Byline: Kill for total peace
I'm coming through on my promise to get a little more hardcore up here in TOME-land, cuz that crap's muh bread and butter and 2011 was an incredible year for releases (which begs the question, just why in the Hell haven't I made my 'best of' list yet? Ugh). All my friends are animals, and I never sleep. If this review's coming out of left field, you probably forgot that one of my first ones was the Wormrot full-length last year.
Anyway, disclaimers are for dorks and right out my gate is a split 7" from two California ragers that've been building steam since their unholy inceptions. Skin Like Iron brings a tunefully gritty blend of straight ahead punk and hardcore to the table. The kind I resist calling "crusty" because a) the term has no meaning any more and b) because "crusty" was a childhood term of endearment that I employed for underwear skid marks. The two offerings here ("Disappear" and "The Parade") stay mid-paced digestable and the raspy vocals shouldn't turn your ultra religious parents off. It does take steady influence from the sonorously dark stylings of those PDX bands that used to be all the rage (there are more, but for time's sake let's just refer to Tragedy). I enjoy 'em, but don't find myself NEEDING many repeat listens. I know there are fans of this band and this style, it just doesn't always flip my cookie, nahmean?
On the flip-side (hyuk hyuk!) Nails has been one of the more interesting hardcore bands to emerge lately. Essentially fashioning themselves as a sonic sleeper hit to metal goons that write off hardcore for it's triteness, they've proven themselves as one of the most punishing bands in the land (Plus, it's really weird to hear them discussed on the Requiem Metal podcast). Led by burly vocalist and riff-master Todd Jones (Carry On, Snake Eyes, Internal Affairs and some dorky ones I won't name), Nails treads deep into the "we're fast, but are we allowed to call this grindcore?" muck and mire, and a label jump to Southern Lord only solidifies their credibility in both camps. (My friend jokingly refers to Southern Lord as the "place where bands go when they're sick of playing hardcore.") When Obscene Humanity dropped onSix Feet Under, it didn't really affect me much. I mean, it was strong and nasty, but it didn't blow my bush back. I can remember my crappy fanzine review of it in which I spent most of it talking about Todd Jones' hair and Mindless Mutant fanzine. Then they dropped Unsilent Death on me and I became an unabashed fanboy. Seeing 'em at This is Hardcore a few years back just did it for me too (Todd Jones pumps his fists a lot...which I back) and I left, completely obsessed with 'em.
Anyway, prepping for a full length on Southern Lord leaves the door open for teasers and splits to tide us over and their side, three and a half minutes of audial savagery, will please any and all longtime fans of the band. Somehow smooshing their chaotically repellent fury into one focused, bone-rattling death ray, "Annihilation" (two and a half minutes) and "Cry Wolf" (thirty seconds) keep a blistering balance of power that's compelling and downright sickening. Miasmally soupy production renders everything slightly more sinister than before, and I detect a higher register in the vocal delivery.
I'm not going to say they're departing much from past styles, but in terms of straight destructive capacity, it's a side well worth the acclaim it's already had heaped atop it. I've heard you can stream the split online, but don't believe everything you hear. Someday there'll be no internet left, and those with the big record collections will rule the lands. Buy up. Your shelves look empty.
Byline: A claustrophobic, cluttery mess to help make my house a home
I recently discovered that Mike Griffin (a contributor over at Foxy Digitalis and also the man behind the music of Parishi) has been casually releasing short-runs of really, really weird stuff on his tape label Skell since 2009. Nice to know this. Here's one from his newest batch, Cody Brant's Toning project (see also: solo tapes on Eggy, Stunned, perhaps more well known for his work with Smegma). It is the jumpy, nervous mess I need in my life right now. I just moved into a new place, and there's so much room for me to stretch out and put everything exactly where I want... that I've actually done just that. Records in place, clothes in droors, I taped up old boxes, swept dust under the rug, downsized the pot and pan count, and everything's just... clean. And organized. It's weird and it's freaking me out a little. So this Toning tape is just the kind clutter I've been kind of itching for, that weird pile of old cut up magazines, mis-boxed VHS tapes and dirty forks scattered about the living room to balance me out.
Brant's objective seems to be stuffing small amounts of textures together into even smaller stereo spaces, letting things bounce off of and scrape against one another to create claustrophobic combinations of seemlingly oppositional tones and sounds. Warming liquid synths vs. cold, hard, jittery noise; the ubiquital "smooth" unwittingly pitted against the forces of friction, all smelted together in a smoldering pot of magmatic ooze. Then there are these crunchy, gutteral electronic beats that jam a log into the gears, scattered about the tape in brief, invasive moments of twisted rhythm... totally weird. Though individually the beats make for some pretty sweet little tunes, it's elsewhere that really Toning shines. Those rumbling tremors of miniauture drone that absolutely crawl. Tightly wound swells softly terrorizing like the most suspensful of horror scenes atop a spidery web of electro-acoustics. Tracks are kept short and focused affairs to round out an otherwise unfocused collection of works. Segues between them might be better planned, but that dosen't really detract from what you can dig out of each track individually—Amorphous guitar loops stacked not-so-neatly over here, gurgling groans peppered with prickly effects over there, and a whole lot of other thought-invoking creepfests to keep your brain busy for the duration.
Toning is presenting a lot of very individual and unique ideas across the two sides of this tape, the kind of thing that makes you want to go track by track describing each and every experiment one by one. Which... I won't waste your time doing. Instead, just know that amidst jangling metallics, humbling guitar refrains, rubbery droplets of tone, and the occasional crunchy electro-beat/slinky sashaying bass line (some complete with gnarly synth solo madness to boot), you'll find a "sound" here, amazingly. For some reason that sound (to me) is like the soundtrack to the boss level on an old arcade game you might have played at Godfather's Pizza growing up as a kid or something. That could be way off. You'll probably get a different feel from Paranormal Romance, but the feel will definitely be there, and it will definitely scream "Toning." Which, ironically, is a name that doesn't fit as well as I want it to—there's less sonic scuplting over time (save for a couple of numbers), more snapshots of pre-determined variables mixing at once, clinging to your eardrums in paranoid stasis. Toning does have a keen understanding of the value of simplicity and minimalism, though, so these short bursts are wisely kept skeletally thin only to maximize the effects of the smaller voices within each track. Never overwhelming, Paranormal Romance feels sized to swallow, even if the gulps can be a bit sharp on the way down.
Inner Islands, the new-ish home of WYLD WYZRDZ, Stag Hare and Gkfoes vjgoaf is steadily reaching an enviable level of proficiency. Envy, however, is not a emotion you would strongly associate with this loose collective of sonic experimenters whose fearless embrace of the ‘new age’ tag has carved out a sound palate uniquely theirs. WYLD WYZRDZ has long been Braden McKenna’s vehicle for deeply personal, transcendental drones. Acceptance, McKenna’s newest offering under that moniker, is a confident statement of unknowing.
Unknowing, different that uncaring or unfeeling, is a difficult and freeing fulcrum to teeter on top of: opening yourself to anything the universe may put in your path while accepting the fact that any answers you receive are your answers. An epistemology that cannot be transferred hands-to-head, or slavish dedication to practice.
Words are all over Acceptance: the wordless kind, guitars that sound like words and the word-word kind. Vocal drones abound across the four tracks of Acceptance. Folded into, stretched across and stitched in, Braden’s voice is a backbone in this multi-vertebrate animal. Acceptance’s closing track incorporates sounds that could be all three. Crystalline guitars covered in a muslin gauze of reverb rebound and blend into actual or imagined choirs singing cantos in the deep recesses of a cathedral; or wordless chanting around dying campfires. It is impossible to tell where these sounds originate. In 16 minutes sounds grow up, grow beards, start thinking for themselves and, though, guided by the steady canter of the loop pedal, become new creatures. Propulsive and cacophonous: I could live in minutes 11:00-16:15 forever.
Declarative as it is, Acceptance isn’t a tract; nor statement, per se. When words act like real words in real life (the kind with referents and signifiers and all that), they communicate an active, open-ended unknowing. After a stanza of things that McKenna’s either knows or doesn’t know, he states, “where am I going? How can I know.” ‘How’ poses this as an open-ended question, a desire for someone or something to fill in the blank, rather than the apathetic shrug to life’s big questions of our mid-twenties.
Acceptance retains elements that have made WYLD WYZRDZ a perennial Tome favorite, the shimmering guitars, effects warped and shifted into unknowable sounds and a light-handed ‘tribal’ beat that corrals everything forward. This all shows up in spades of spades. Acceptance; however, asks big questions; it also gets big returns.
Byline: Pop tunes, beats, synths and a deep, deep voice with which to remember the mother of Noah Wall. Sink yr teeth in and bite yr lip
I feel compelled to write another long-overdue review of a tape. Because all of the great stuff that's here: Instruments, tones, beats... general weirdness. This tape is full of some really inventive arrangements of synths, guitars, samples, midi-winds, choppy rhythms and great songs. But mostly it's that voice... I think it's time our generation had a new one, and Noah Wall may be just what I've been looking for. It's distinctively deep, appropriately creepy at times (especially when pitch-shifted or multi-tracked in those pale, sickly disharmonies), but always wholly convincing. And Hèloïse really centers around the vocals and the words they relate, just as Dwight Pavolovic put it in his thoughtful write up on Get Off the Coastupon the album's release for his label Crash Symbols (co-run by Jheri Evans). Which brings me to my first comparison for Wall's work: Magnetic Fields. I've done some research on this electro-twee Brooklynite, read a few reviews and not a single one mentions Stephen Merritt anywhere, which baffles me completely. The two both share a rich baritone vocal quality, and Wall's glitchy, micro-melodic pop manner instantly brings the bands' classic Charm of the Highway Strip to mind. But the two are also similar in how the voice is so out in front of everything else, championing lyrical content and stylistic, deadpan delivery above all else. Of course, there's plenty of other influences finding their way into Hèloïse's sprawling, almost intimidatingly full production. John Lennon's an easy one as the album's first track is a cover of his tune "Mind Games," brilliantly realized in bent-out-of-shape fashion. I've seen Brian Eno name-dropped elsewhere, and that makes some sense when thinking about Wall's relationship to 70s proto glam/neo-disco beats which at times bring earlier pop albums like Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) back into the consciousness. I have to even mention Tina Turner as "Public Dancer" contains a snippet of "What's Love Got to Do With it" (which is as awesome and awkward as you might think it would be).
But yes, the voice. Let's return to it and the lyrics, and how it all interacts with the music, which is what makes Noah Wall and Hèloïse truly special. The album itself is a tribute to Wall's passed mother (that's her name: Hèloïse), and the words find him in a gently somber state with moments of first-person remembrance and nostalgia. There's plenty of joyous moments throughout (good times), also sad, tranquil moments (the bad? or at least the truly missed), and then there's that sense of nervous tension. Disparate combinations of styles and sounds, the pushes/pulls of consonance and disonance in the tones offering a playful take on the mother/son correlation and oft-dichotomic clash. All told it's an emotional statement, and a well thought out and passionately powerful one at that, despite its light-hearted/footed touch. Noah Wall, low-voiced 35-year old that he is, sounding just as youthful as ever, tip-toe dancing his way around these tracks or sulking in his bunk-bed, perhaps, pondering things like death and demons and trying to remember that it's all ok: His mom's still there with him, even now after the lights have gone out.
Noah Wall on Bandcamp (p.s. Go here to find the free album Why Lie, I'm 35—a recently revisited set of material from Wall dating back to sonic experiments/songs from 1995!)
Video for "Mind Games" by Carlos Charlie Perez ::
Audio stream of "4AR" ::
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For: John Fahey & Cul De Sac, High Aura’d, Animal Hospital
Byline: Impossibly gorgeous improv/drone project from Italian deconstructionalists the Opalio brothers
Has the inevitable happened? Have all the good band names been used up? Did Dinowalrus take the last good band name? Actually, Dinowalrus is a terrible band name. My Cat is An Alien is an awesome band name. It joins a distinguished pedigree of other cool cat related band names (Birchville Cat Motel, My Cat's a Stargazer, The Cats’ Orchestra, Lust-Cats of the Gutters) that have been lucky enough to grace our ears since 2009.
There is a certain joy that comes with planning and careful execution. Lay-ups, timed pyrotechnics at arena rock concerts and surprise birthday parties fall into this category. There is another type of joy; the kind that comes from exploration, discovery and unplanned edits and corrections. Steals, Ornette Coleman, and making love fall into this category. Listening to and watching musicians playing drone-based music of this ilk definitely falls into the latter.
My Cat is An Alien is the deconstructed folk/ambient/improv/drone project of the Italian brother duo Maurizio and Roberto Opalio. Since 1998 they have released collaborations with the likes of Thurston Moore, Jackie-O-Motherfucker, and Jim O’Rourke. These guys have an impossibly huge back catalogue. My Cat’s untitled compositions have a starting point and destination in mind, but the Opalios are not in any hurry to get there. Often they start with a simple, unaccompanied guitar, organ or autoharp (?) and after it is looped back on itself a few times, run through a bevy of filters, is edited, minced to bits and gets all atonal, the track becomes a swirling, breathy whirlpool sucking the nouns (people, places and things) out of wordless vocals and pranging particles of notes together to create chance cluster chords and multi-personality disorder solipsism. This is some serious deconstruction/deconstructualism happening.
Living on the Invisible Line is comprised of four untitled compositions that are brimming with discovery, disruptions and tape-static decay. Three out of the four tracks somewhat follow the blueprint I've laid out above. Music fed into a concrete mixer, folded, buried and fed into itself to create something beautifully overwhelming and a cabin-in-the-woods multitude of terrifying voices. Track four (which in the album order is track three) is a Faust-like tape-edit experiment with traffic jam vocal tracks, feedback and squalor before it fades to a placid and haunting five-minute guitar and vocal harmony that floats, specter-like, into finality. Completely beautiful and transfixing. A near perfect album.
Maybe it's because it is 1:35 AM right now (as of writing) and this fits my brainwaves at the moment, or maybe it's just the work itself, but holy crap you have GOT to watch this new Clearing video byGeoffrey Sexton from one of the two new No Kings tapes. I never knew light and sound could play together so intricately. There are layers upon layers of images from various sources intricately woven & laid upon a bed of subtly shifting sonic ambience.
Some eyes flicker by once in a while, but it's mostly prisms, spectra, and indecipherable microscopic-looking textures in a cosmic tinted sea. The Murfreesboro scene is throwing down some seriously wonderful shit, my friends.
Byline: Ramped up, fist-pumping electro-blasts from Moscow
Yeah, this one has been out for a little while (Stoned Boys' Souncloud page shows the tracks were uploaded about a year ago), but it just came in the mail literally yesterday, and it bangs so hard, I couldn't really contain myself. Probably because it's an album that can't really contain itself. Raw energy, orgiastic, ecstatic blasts of fanfare synths, heavy bass, shocking noise and terrifically terrifying screams from a vocalist. Beyond genre, style and whatever else, Stoned Boys is distinguished most by its conviction and blinding passion. These dudes mean serious business.
On their debut, the duo generally hangs around a skull-pulverizing, four-on-the-floor beat thing. And though they might lean this direction, they definitely don't use it as a crutch. There's plenty of rhythmic diversity here, especially "Africa" and that rolling 6/8 feel or the devastating 2-step stomp of "Needles." There's also enough weirdo and chaotic intrigue to distance Stoned Boys from your run-of-the-mill Jersey Shore fist-pumpers—this stuff is full of blitzkrieg cutups, razor-sharp gating and frenetic glissandos giving the entire thing a swirling, psychedelic edge. This is acid-break laden music that actually makes you feel like you're on acid. And the tones... incredibly deep, dimensional portals, swirling vortexes of synth that suck you in and don't loosen their grip.
One criticism I've had of stuff pseudo-related to what Stoned Boys do is that it's all so dynamically flat, one volume (fucking loud), all the damned time. But Stoned Boys do a good job of pacing their tunes out with builds and expertly placed moments of release. Bookenders "Anger" and "Small Perfect World" feel like a constant crescendos, synths piling up, beats doubling over as the colors brighten and intensify, all welling up to explosive climaxes. Also, a slower tune like "Dead Friends," in all its dark, forlorn, sulking sag softens the blows a bit lending a greater focus on melody vis-à-vis the mind-scrambling doses of noise.
So you've got a consistent style here, but you've got it from a multitude of different perspectives, a group utilizing different musical tools and the infinite wisdom of forty years of electronic music to create a diverse sounding record that remains a uniform, utterly modern statement. You might notice the three "For"'s listed above there are all Denver-based artists. I didn't plan it that way, but it's hard not to mention them. For in all their Russian amazingness, Stoned Boys would just fit so, so perfectly at a 2AM Rhinoceropolis dance party, it's just ridiculous. And maybe part of it is the fact that this came in the mail from a formerly Denver-based label, Ryan McRyhew's excellent Laser Palace imprint. In any case, Denver's dance crew and beyond should find this diggable to the max. Grip one here.
I'll spare you the cheesy Happy New Year joke/intro to this post, even though this first sentence is still just exactly that... yes, this is indeed my first post of the new year! Finally. Sorry I've been out for so long, had a nice long vacation, but I'm back and ready for action. And what better way to get 2012 rolling than with a video from two of the TOME's favs, Happy New Year on the jams and Rob Feulner on the visuals? Answer: there is no better way.
The track is the b-side off Happy New Year's stellar new 7-inch, and it's an extended version of the track—over 12 solid minutes of brooding, subconscious-whispering seduction from Eleanor Logan's breathy delivery for Feulner to work with. He mirrors the track's theme of transformation by using source material from "Paris is Burning,"—apt enough. But the project displays both artists "transforming" themselves on another level as well. For one, both are working in this new elongated format, and really succeeding. The video just remains extremely enjoyable to hear/watch throughout its run time, no easy feat for what is ostensibly pop music (be it slow and psychedelic pop). Logan seems to be tightening up her groove, slowing things down and widening out the sound palate with space. Feulner, meanwhile, continues to explore the medium of VHS cassette with plenty of humor, brilliantly editing stops timed with the music and making things like the annoyance of video tracking into something artful and clever. If this isn't the best work from either of them yet, it's damn close. And together their art is on another level entirely.
Another note: Logan is actually in this video, which I believe marks the first artist-appearance in a Feulner-directed music video. Fun fact, you'll find that one in the Trivial Pursuit - Tome Edition out this year, just in time for the holidays.
So yeah, Happy New Year indeed. Nab the 7-inch (for a mere five bucks!) from Eleanor's label, Crikey Records.
